Saturday, February 14, 2015

Fascism in Putin’s Russia Likely to be Fascism of the Left, Oleynik Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, February 14 – Most in
Russia and many in the West are so used to thinking of fascism and especially
Nazism as a phenomenon of the extreme right that they do not remember that
Nazism was National Socialism and that until the Rohm Purge it was as much a
movement of the left as of the right.

That failure to understand the roots
of Nazism, a failure largely maintained by Soviet and Russian insistence that
the Nazis never be identified by the full name of their party – the National
Socialist German Workers Party – and by intellectual laziness in the West is
limiting the ability of analysts to understand the kind of fascism Vladimir
Putin is building.

As a result, while many have talked
about “a Weimar scenario” for Russia, few have considered that Vladimir Putin
may seek to promote what could be called “left-wing” fascism rather than the “right
wing” kind that most people think is the only one that can exist or that the “left-wing”
variety, which stresses socialist elements, explains the support he and it
have.

In yesterday’s “Vedomosti,” Anton
Oleynik, a scholar at Memorial University in Canada, argues that fascism has
its roots not in the class politics Marxism suggests but elsewhere, in “the
discrediting of formal institutions because of the lack of correspondence
between them and actual practice” and a sense that in that situation one’s
interests can be defended only by force (vedomosti.ru/opinion/news/39372581/ugroza-fashizma?full#cut).

To the extent that is the case, he
argues, fascism in Russia would not necessarily be introduced by the extreme
right but could draw support “by its actions” from ordinary citizens and representatives
of the authorities,” who have lost any faith in the “formal institutions” of
domestic governance or international relations.

In that event and for that reason, “as
was the case in Weimar Germany, the fascist project in Russia has the chance to
gain the support of the majority,” although those who support this project won’t
call it fascism or themselves fascists. But then, as Oleynik points out, “Hitler
didn’t call himself a fascist either.”

Oleynik begins his article by
observing that it is now fashionable in Russia to use the word “fascist” and
its derivatives to talk about the extreme right in that country. But that use
by itself distracts attention from “a source of fascism which allows it to
flourish precisely in Russia today – the inability of formal institutions to
correspond to the expectations of the population.”

Institutions, as Douglas North has
pointed out in his book “Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic
Performance,” establish the frameworks for human interaction, that is, “the
rules of the game.”But what is
critical, Oleynik says, is whether formal institutions correspondent to actual
practice or not.

If they don’t, then sooner or later,
people turn away from the formal institutions because “no one likes playing in
an ‘alien’ game.”That is exactly what
has happened in Russia both with regard to democracy at home and the
international rules of the game established by the West over the last two
decades abroad.

When an individual or a country
refuses to play by the rules, it either “refuses to play” and leaves the game
to others or makes an effort to impose its rules on others by force.

The Weimar Republic lasted only 14
years, but it represented an attempt to find “a ‘wise compromise’ between
revolution and the status quo. (It was also, Oleynik notes, “the first attempt
at the existence of a unified Germany.”) The attempt did not succeed and ended
with Hitler’s coming to power.

There has been much
interest in Russia in the Weimar case “because of certain analogies between
Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia. The latter also became the product of a
rejection of a revolutionary variant of development.” Indeed, “in 1991, a real
revolution did not take place.”

Instead, “in place of the Soviet
empire which had disappeared gradually has been restored another empire, a New
Russian one. Its size is not comparable with the Soviet one, but the principle
is the same,” Oleynik says. That sets up the possibility that after a
Weimar-like period, Russia could enter into a fascist one.

One of the first to warn of this
danger was Aleksandr Yanov in his 1995 book, “After Yetlsin: ‘Weimar’ Russia”
in which he pointed to the internal weakness of the empire, something exacerbated
by the weakness of democratic institutions into what he suggested was “an
explosive mixture.”

During the prosperous first decade
of the 21st century, many forgot about this prediction, but in fact,
it was exactly during that period that the preconditions for its fulfillment
were met: “The empire stood up again. Sovereign democracy strengthened. Art and
sport flourished,” again just as in Weimar times.

In many respects, Oleynik says, “the
defeat of the USSR in the Cold War played a role analogous in contemporary
Russia” to what Germany’s defeat in World War I did. “Formally, there wasn’t
any capitulation, but the status of super power was lost” and from the point of
view of others, Russia was no longer an empire but “an ordinary country.”

As in Weimar Germany so too in
post-Soviet Russia, many people were anythingbut acceptant of that change, and their feelings were exacerbated by the
fact that “as in Weimar Germany,” democratic institutions in Russia “’haven’t
worked.’”As a result, democracy has
come to be associated only with elite games and popular suffering.

German theorist Peter Sloterdijk
said of Weimar that “everywhere the bitter feeing of having been deceived was
combined with the sense that everything had to begin again from square one,” a
statement that could be applied with equal force to post-Soviet Russia, Oleynik
argues.

Moreover, as Sloterdijk has written,
fascism “directly rejects efforts to somehow legitimate itself by openly
proclaiming cruelty and ‘holy egotism’ as a political necessarity and a
historical-biological law.” In such circumstances, nationalism “becomes one of the
means of rejecting formal institutions of democracy and international
agreements viewed as alien and as having been imposed from the outside.”

Again, Russia fully fits into this
pattern, deploying force outside its borders to correct what it sees as a world
order that was imposed on it and force within its borders to correct a situation
that the institutions it was compelled to accept do not work or in fact work
directly against its interests.

If the economic situation worsens
and popular dissatisfaction increases, Oleynik suggests, these forces working
to bring fascism, especially a left fascism, to Russia will only increase not
only as a survival strategy for the elites but also as a means of resolving the
sense of betrayal among many members of the population.